[navels]

What a useless article, especially given the title. Here's all they have to say about the layout:

There’s some dispute over how and why Sholes and Glidden arrived at the QWERTY layout. Some historians have argued that it solved a jamming problem by spacing out the most common letters in English; others, particularly more recent historians, hold that it was designed specifically to help telegraphists avoid common errors when transcribing Morse code. Regardless, after around 30 test models, Sholes and Glidden settled on QWERTY—and changed the world.

[happytoexplain]

I disagree. When I have a question, I am prepared for the answer to have some amount of ambiguity, especially when it comes to historical questions of the format "why is X", "how did X originate", etc. If I were trying to choose a descriptive name for an article, the question that it researches is a reasonable choice. Combined then, I am happy with the article's content given its title, and I am happy with the information it delivered to me without my having to do my own research. I don't feel that this is clickbait, nor do I feel qualified to assert that their conclusion is wrong.

[ghaff]

Yes, and like many I've heard the anti-jamming explanation (contra the slow typists down one), so I actually find it interesting that this is a somewhat unsettled question.

[phkahler]

>> There’s some dispute over how and why Sholes and Glidden arrived at the QWERTY layout.

Well at least it says who came up with it and when, so we know who to blame for it. None of the common suggestions make sense to me. It might be useful to examine the design of their first model now that we know who made it.

[mavhc]

Starting with a piano keyboard where A-L were on the black notes and M-Z on the white below them in reverse order

Then the vowels were moved to the top row These letters still fit that pattern eyuio adfghjkl mnvxz

I and O were near 9 and 8 because they were also used as 1 and 0 to save keys, and people wanted to type 1870 etc easily.

A was swapped back to the middle row for ease of use, everything else was pretty much to avoid patents of other layouts

QWERTY stuck because typing classes were invented and they first used QWERTY